Golden Experience

She decided that the next player she found would die directly by her hand.

However, that was only if time permitted, since she was having a bit of trouble locating her next victim. The other players were probably fighting each other and their numbers were rapidly dropping. But so far, every player she beat took only a single blow to send them to their graves; none of them felt like they were still alive because they had emerged victorious after defeating another player.

In which case, there should still be a strong player here. With those thoughts, Rare began to stay on guard while moving around. Since she was decked out in full armor, there was no way for her to achieve perfect stealth, so she had no choice but to leverage [Enhanced Hearing] to pick up the noises they made first. If her opponent also had some kind of strengthened hearing, then she’d lose this advantage, but there was nothing she could do about that at this point in time.

She quietly advanced through the forest while concentrating solely on her ears. At long last, she caught the faint sound of clashing. There was the unnatural ring of metal, and the sound of footsteps mixed in. It was probably someone in combat. Rare focused primarily on those noises, still staying aware of her surroundings, and carefully closed in on them.

The sounds led her to the sight of two players locking swords. From the sword skills that they used, they must have invested quite a lot of XP. In addition, it was clear that they were both naturally skilled at the blade. In other words, this was the perfect time to test Yoroizaka’s skills.

Rare purposely made a lot of noise as she stepped out before the two.

“Huh?! It’s another player!”

“Don’t be in such a rush. I’ll take you on after taking care of this guy, so don’t get in the way!”

The two of them noticed her, but neither seemed interested in stopping their match. Rare casually walked up to them and swung her sword.

“What the—?!”

“You bastard! All right then! You’re first now…”

—Wonderful, they’re strong enough to chat while fighting.

Using Yoroizaka’s [Slash] skill resulted in sweeping sideways with a Kenzaki. [Slash] was, as advertised, a skill that generated a slashing attack with a sword, but the orientation of the sword when the skill was activated changed whether it was a vertical or horizontal slash. Rather than deliberately aiming at a specific player, since the sword was in her right hand, it slashed to the right, at the chatterbox guy. He unconsciously reacted to block with his sword, but his sword was poor quality. Without any meaningful resistance, slash went right through the raised sword. Yoroizaka and the Kenzakis made a formidable team.

“No way!!!”

The slashed player died instantly, so the one who shouted was the other player. Now completely on guard against Rare, he jumped back to put some distance between them and readied his sword. However, against Yoroizaka and the Kenzakis, such little distance was akin to nothing. The [Flash Step] skill was found far down in the [Nimble] tree; using it instantly closed the distance between them, and a vertical [Slash] cut the second player in half.

—I thought they would be pretty strong, at least based on the mood…

Rare felt a bit disappointed. She had no idea how many players were left, but it would be pretty difficult to devote the rest of the time limit to hunting them down. If there were any players who were also hiding, it would be hard to find them. If there was one thing she could take back from this experience, it was that she could use some sort of searching or detection skill to help her out a bit.

—Wait, hold up a sec.

She suddenly looked over at the Kenzaki brothers. They were able to fly on their own.

—Jirou, Saburou, Shirou, and Gorou, fly up above the forest and look for players. If you find any, report in… Ah, no, just cut them down on the spot.

She didn’t need to continue testing out Yoroizaka’s capabilities. What she’d seen so far was more than satisfactory. After watching the four swords fly off, Rare resumed her own search for more players. However, after that, Rare didn’t encounter anyone else, and eventually the notice came that her block’s preliminaries were over.

A minute later, Rare received another notification about being automatically transported to the spectator seats; she quickly canceled the possession, crawled out of the tree hollow, then summoned Yoroizaka to her. She had Yoroizaka help reequip all the armor and put on her cloak before a glow appeared at her feet and she was transported. Made it by a hair’s breadth. The accursed sunlight apparently didn’t have any lasting effects if she only spent a short time exposed in the shade under trees, and she didn’t feel like she had taken any damage either. Knowing this, perhaps she could be a little more cavalier in the future.

The spectator seats were packed with players, and the standing gallery on the outer perimeter where Rare materialized paid her no mind. She had her cloak on, which helped temper Yoroizaka’s impressively intimidating appearance. Looking into the arena, numerous monitors were floating in the air, which allowed any person from any seat to see the action in any block. However, there was no way to watch just any battle taking place; she wasn’t sure where they were, but the monitors only showed the fights that the camera focused on. In addition, as far as she could see, they only filmed actual battles; there was a good chance that the place Rare had been hiding and the place where the archers had laid in ambush, background scenes, were not shown on any monitors.

The players around her were all abuzz about the one monitor that went black, which was probably the one showing Rare’s block. According to what she overheard from the players chatting about it, the last thing it had displayed was the battle between those two players and Yoroizaka, after which her four swords flew away in all directions while Yoroizaka stalked off. They didn’t see the final scene of Rare quickly getting into the armor.

“I wonder who that was, the black armored knight?”

“They were way too overpowered. Do you think it could be some kind of special event boss the admins added?”

“That might be a bit of a stretch. If that were the case, wouldn’t the players in block sixteen complain?”

“With so many players excited about participating in the event, it’d be shitty for there to be an unbeatable boss. There’s no way.”

“So you think that was a player…? What the hell did they do in two weeks to afford a complete suit of armor?”

“They probably robbed a merchant, yeah? They easily cut a player in half, so it’s gotta be someone pretty stone-cold.”

“Right, that part’s weird, isn’t it? How much STR would you need to cut clean through that guy’s sword?”

As she expected, she definitely stood out. Based on the amount of XP she had earned, Rare didn’t doubt that her power was at the top, but she thought there should at least be some decent players who could put up a proper fight against Yoroizaka. If there were actually someone at that level, then after defeating Yoroizaka, then she thought she could play at “unleashing the final boss’s second form,” but she didn’t think that was likely to happen anymore.

The monitors captured the myriad battles unfolding in various places. Many of them included tricking opponents into falling for traps, so they served as great study material for Rare. With them as reference, she could try applying that knowledge in the great forest.